Rick West

I’m currently enrolled in a Communities as a Metaphor for Learning class, and as part of the class I need to select a book to read on the subject. We are already reading one of Etienne Wenger’s books on Communities of Practice, so I’d like to get the perspective of somebody besides Wenger for this other book. Here are a few that I am considering:

Collaborating Online: Learning Together in Community (Jossey-Bass Guides to Online Teaching and Learning) (Paperback)

by Rena M. Palloff, Keith Pratt, 27 bucks

Renninger, K.A., Shumar, W., Pea, R., Brown, J.S. (2002). Building Virtual Communities:
Learning and Change in Cyberspace (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive
and Computational Perspectives) (Paperback)

McConnell,  (2006). E-learning groups and communities of practice

Engaging the Online Learner: Activities and Resources for Creative Instruction (Online Teaching and Learning Series (OTL))

by Rita-Marie Conrad and J. Ana Donaldson

(Paperback - Jan 7, 2004)

So here are a few questions:

1. Does anyone know Dr. McConnell and can guess whether his book is good? It’d be nice, since I need to do a book review, to do it on a recently published book so I could then publish it in a journal of book reviews. But conversely, this book is so new that nobody else has reviewed it either and I don’t know if it’d be worthwhile to read!
2. Any suggestions or ideas on books that anyone would recommend? I am interested in learning communities as applied not only to online environments but also classroom environments. I’d like to find a book that discusses how to research learning communities, how to identify and classify them, and how to observe participation in them. Any ideas?

technorati tags:online, distance, education, communities, learning, practice, Cops, community, book

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So last week I lamented the lack of research being done about one of the most widely implemented distance learning technologies, the course management system, and then today I opened up my AERA reviewer’s box and found two proposals related to CMSs for me to review.

I was elated! The titles were catchy, and it seemed we might be getting somewhere. Then I read the proposals.

One was a five-interview study on faculty perceptions of switching from one CMS to another. Like most research on CMSs, this was a diminutive study, tenuously supported by theory and not very generalizable in its implications. The other proposal ended up not being about research at all, but was a proposed roundtable to teach attendees about different CMS technologies. While it seemed like the author is knowledgeable and might teach a good workshop, as a research paper proposal, it fell short.

So in the end reviewing these proposals only strengthened my belief that we really haven’t effectively studied the impacts from implementing CMS technologies yet.

technorati tags:AECT2006, BlogTracks, BlogTrack, CMS, distance, learning, research, literature

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Myung-Hwa recently posted a short blurb to introduce her BlogTracks blog:

I am currently taking a comps. I have read my books and articels about the small grouop collaborative learning. Today, I read instructors’ role and tools. I am thinking about providinge a tool to my research participants in my dissertation. but I do not know if they can use the tool. So, I almost decide a courseware system that an instructor provides. Do you think WebCT or blackboard is a collaborative tool?

MyungHwa

I thought her question at the end was interesting. Is WebCT and Blackboard a collaborative tool? Has anyone really studied this issue? This is something that I have been interested in lately, which is studying more closely the impact from using CMS tools in higher education. Richard Clark disciples argue that technology does not impact learning, but I think most educational researchers would now say that this argument is behind us. Pedagogy will always be more important than technology, but technology does impact what kinds of pedagogy you can, or are more likely, to employ. So technologies like CMS tools are very important, and it is critical that institutions don’t employ CMS technologies without giving serious thought to what kinds of pedagogies they will promote.

My role in this Blog Tracks is mostly to discuss the historical development of the literature and to look at new patterns in the publication of current research. An interesting pattern that I have found is that there is surprisingly very, very little research done about the impact of using a course management tool in higher education, and the research that has been completed is very weak and not very comprehensive and more along the lines of “did this class like using WebCT? We found that they did like it” or something else that really doesn’t tell us much.

In a review of the literature that I did recently for an article, I found several small research studies reporting that using a CMS can be helpful for improving communication and collaboration in a course (Hutchins, 2001; Pollack, 2003); increasing student preparation for class and improving the quality of in-class time (Massimo, 2003); enhancing class lectures and feedback to students about grades (Morgan, 2003); giving students greater access to materials (Yip, 2004); and improving learning in other ways (Klecker, 2002). However, other studies have found no significant difference between the grades of students using a CMS and students who did not (Vessell, 2001), and that the benefits of using a CMS can be counter-balanced by many flaws in the software, causing slowness or instability (Dutton, Cheong, & Park, 2004).

In my search of several of the major databases in the fall of 2005 (ERIC, Education Full Text, WebSPIRS, PsychInfo and Ingenta) I found 164 published articles that mentioned course management systems, Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle, CMS, or other similar terms in the abstracts. But of these, only 74 appeared to be data-driven articles, and most of these were quick evaluations of how a CMS impacted a particular class or context. Less than 10 studies seemed to attempt a more general evaluation of the impact from using a CMS over multiple contexts, such as multiple university departments.

Two of the more extensive evaluations of CMS technologies have been completed by the Educause Center for Applied Research (Morgan, 2003; ECAR, 2005). In these reports, the authors have used survey research to conclude there are many positive effects from using course management systems, and that the majority of instructors and students are satisfied with these technologies. However I’m a little suspicious of these reports because I don’t know if they had completely objective purposes.

So I argue that we haven’t really done a very good job of studying what happens when a CMS tool is implemented university-wide, as has happened to thousands of institutions across the country. It is becoming more and more imperative that we DO study the effect of using CMS tools because now over 95% of colleges and universities use some form of e-learning system (Pollack, 2003), usually an expensive course management system. I’m still quite surprised that schools will easily fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars for a CMS without extensive research into whether having that CMS will actually improve learning. In fact I’m more than surprised, as a taxpayer I’m very upset about it!

To close, I pose these questions for discussion, and will share my thoughts on them in a later post, if I remember :-).

1. Why isn’t more research conducted about CMS technologies?

2. What kind of research should we be conducting about CMSs? What outcomes? What measures?

3. Do you agree with me that we’re making a mistake by ignoring CMSs in our educational research?

4. Have we missed the opportunity to really see what happens from implementing a CMS because the tools are now almost as ubiquitous as word processing at some universities?

Note: Some of this material was taken, in a couple of places verbatim, from an article I am preparing for publication. I’d post the whole article here if it wasn’t the case that some journals would consider that to be a “prior publishing” of the article and the article would then be disqualified from further publication. That’s ridiculous if you ask me, but I don’t make the rules!

References

Dutton, W. H., Cheong, P. H., & Park, N. (2004). The social shaping of a virtual learning
    environment: The case of a university-wide course management system. Electronic
    Journal of e-Learning, 2(1), 69-80.

Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR). (2005). ECAR Study of Students and
    Information Technology, 2005: Convenience, Connection, Control, and Learning.
    Accessed February 24, 2006, from http://www.educause.edu/ers0506.

Hutchins, H. M. (2001). Enhancing the business communication course through WebCT.
    Business Communications Quarterly, 64(3), 87-95.

Klecker, B. M. (2002). Evaluation of electronic Blackboard enhancement of a graduate course in
    school counseling. Paper presented at the conference for the Mid-South Educational
    Research Association, held at Chattanooga, TN.

Massimo, V. S. (2003). Integrating the WebCT discussion feature into social work courses: An
    assessment focused on pedagogy and practicality. Journal of Technology in Human
    Services. 22(1), 49-64.

Morgan, G. (2003). Faculty use of course management systems. Denver: Educause Center for
    Applied Research.

Pollack, T. A. (2003). Using a course management system to improve instruction. Paper
    presented at the annual conference of the Association of Small Computer Users in     Education, held at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Yip, M. C. W. (2004). Using WebCT to teach courses online. British Journal of Educational
    Technology, 35(4), 497-501.

technorati tags:AECT2006, AECT, Blogtrack, CMS, distance, education, research

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I’m not sure what this post will have to do with distance education, but it’s what is on my mind after reading a couple of interesting posts from my colleague in this BlogTracks, Denise. She is focusing her research on informal learning in DE environments and gives a definition of informal learning as coming from Falk, Scott, Dierking, Rennie, & Cohen Jones (2004):

shifts in attitudes, values, and beliefs; aesthetic understandings; psychomotor skills, such as discovering how it feels to turn a pot or play an instrument; social/cultural dimensions such as learning about someone in your family; and process skills such as thinking critically and refining one’s learning skills, or perhaps even learning more about how to use a museum for lifelong learning. (p. 172)

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She then concludes by asking, “See? Messy. How on earth do you begin to assess this, particularly when
the learners themselves are often unaware that they have learned?”

Indeed! How can you measure informal learning? This is a question I’ve thought about a lot in the past because I am interested in evaluation studies, but also have interests in studies about communities of learning and human interaction impacts on learning, which involves a lot of informal learning. So I believe personally that these messy, non-cognitive aspects of education, can have as big, or bigger, impact on a student’s future happiness, success, and lifelong learning as cognitive aspects. I think it matters a great deal more what a student can do, how they control their own emotions, regulate their own motivations and actions, relate to others, and develop inner integrity, rather than what they memorize from a textbook.

And yet it’s the latter, what they memorize from a textbook, that you would think is most important because of recent policy emphasis on test scores. I don’t believe that this textbook learning is as important as informal learning. Can I prove it? Not really, because of what Denise said: How do you assess it?

This brings me to another question: If you can’t assess it, is it then not important? Of course not. To argue that is silly. There are a lot of things that are important that are difficult to assess. But if we require educational goals to be tied to assessments, then we are requiring educators to ignore many other important aspects of learning.

As I write this I am cringing. Do I believe educators should be accountable to do a good job? Yes. Do I believe we should care that students do better on tests and have basic math, science and English skills? Yes. So I do believe in testing and using tests to guide teaching. I just don’t want to also ignore the messy, harder-to-assess-but-still-important educational goals.

Another thought on my mind this week is my own four-year-old attending school for the first time—full-time preschool. As I watch her go to school and see the classrooom situation, it is easily apparent that she’ll be learning a lot of wonderful things. But I wonder what kinds of informal learning she will pick up that I might not want her to learn so young? She will now spend as much time associating with a teacher I have met for only 10 minutes, and students I haven’t met at all, than with me and her mother. Will she pick up more values, attitudes, expectations, etc. from her teacher or from me? Hopefully her teacher has a lot of the same values, attitudes, and expectations that we do so that it doesn’t matter too much, but who knows?

This long rambling of a personal nature, I guess, comes to this point: I agree with Denise that informal learning is a much more powerful component of who we become than we tend to think, and is much more important than current educational policies account for. We should be thinking a LOT more about what students are learning informally, and it’s embarrassing that there is so little research done about informal learning on the web, since so many young people spend so much time on the Internet.

Go Denise! Fill that research gap!

technorati tags:blogtracks, AECT2006, Blogtracks2006, AECT, informal, learning

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